The Dangers of Open Content

gihan_ripper writes "Recently released open movie Elephants Dream found itself in hot water with Catalonians after accidentally using an offensive word instead of 'Català' in the subtitle menu. The cause? Designer Matt Ebb had used Wikipedia to look up the Catalan word for Catalan on a day when the entry had been vandalized. He writes about this experience on the Elephant Dream blog. We may have scoffed at John Seigenthaler over his criticisms of Wikipedia, but it gives us pause for thought when we to heavily on Wikipedia."

Wikipedia grammar?

[thc69]

when we to heavily on Wikipedia

Nuff said.

Oops.

[CCFreak2K]

I find this funny that it's right on the heels of the new release of Blender article. I believe the saying goes:

If you have an open mind, people will throw a lot of garbage into it.

Re:Wikipedia grammar?

[Sam H]

Bad luck, you visited Slashdot the day it was vandalised.

Amateur mistake.

[ScentCone]

By now, everyone knows that research on spelling, regional colloquialisms, and obscure information is best (and most accurately) satisfied by a visit to MySpace. After all, it's the busiest destination on the web now, and millions of people can't be wrong.

Re:Dangers of international content?

[Who235]

Well, it was in Wikipedia. . .

Re:Dangers of international content?

[Tatarize]

>>I'd go out on a limb and say that any open project can quite easily rustle up competent (and sometimes truly expert) help for any language or localization issue.

I don't think this is an issue. I mean, Elephant's Dream sucked in English and even properly translated would have issues. I think that, if rather than the dialog in the flick they said profane words... it would have been much more watchable.

Proves we could do CGI... and we should figure out scriptwriting.